US Society 77
United States at the Crossroads
United States at the Crossroads
As the crisis in the U.S. deepens and the protests following George Floyd’s assassination take on a broader tone, old and new wounds of a society in need of profound change come to light
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Author: Raúl Antonio Capote | internacionales@granma.cu
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.
The protests take on a broader tone, bringing out old and new wounds of a society in need of profound change. Photo: La Vanguardia
As the crisis in the U.S. deepens and the protests that have erupted in the wake of George Floyd’s assassination take on a broader tone, old and new wounds of a society in need of profound change come to light.
The makeup that was intended to cover the worn-out face of the US Statue of “Liberty” is slowly fading, and the truth is making its way into the minds and hearts of the people. A protester in New York asks in front of the cameras of a TV network covering the protests: Where is the greatest country in the world, and he answers himself with anger and pain: “It is not here.”
It’s a fact that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo boasts of being an accomplished liar and recalls during an interview at the University of Texas A&M, the time when he was director of the company, his image as a supposed strongman is not respected either.
The head of U.S. diplomacy is still the same cynic who said, “I was the director of the company. We lied, cheated and stole. We even had training courses” which drew applause from those present, who must have included some of those who, these days, obeying Trump’s “guidance”, gargle with chlorine to combat COVID-19.
You can’t fool everyone all the time. The current government is responsible for more than 112,000 deaths from the pandemic, rampant unemployment, loss of rights, hunger for many (a hunger they can no longer hide), lack of medical care for the majority of the people and racial discrimination.
The man already considered by many the worst president in the history of the United States is covered by a deluge of criticism, with a shower of lies launched through Twitter, a kind of “counter-water” strategy that seems to make no sense, but it does.
Donald Trump speaks to his base, those who voted for him in the previous election, and hopes they will do so in the next one, on November 3. They are secure bases that have remained faithful to their president, despite the defection of a group of the less firm.
Who will vote for whom?
Those who will vote for Trump are those who see him as a “winner” who will achieve success for America, those who admire his showmanship, his misogynistic poses, his image as a rich, powerful man, with a lot of luck with women.
Those who are alienated by conspiracy theories, including those who believe that health care reform and 5G [Internet] seek to control the population.
The U.S. government, which is opposed to vaccination, believes that the left belongs to an alien invading race that wants to dominate the world, and a thousand and one other absurd theories.
Trump gloats over the unconditional love that many ultra-nationalists, religious fanatics, racists, supremacists, and separatists have for him, to whom he presents himself as a political outsider.
Trump and his team calculate that many of the people who oppose his re-election will not vote for Joe Biden either.
They estimate that the most radicals, who want a profound change in the country, would not vote for the neo-liberal group that the former vice president represents. Many millennials and Z-generation supporters do not see Biden as a viable option for solving the country’s problems.
Therefore, faced with possible massive abstentionism, motivated by the lack of valid alternatives and the security of the vote of their bases, the followers of the current president trust that they can win again.
An uncertain future
However, the situation is getting darker for him. Important figures of the Republican Party, prestigious military and hawks with voice and influence, are closing ranks against Trump’s possible re-election.
Colin Powell, former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was the last of a series of retired senior officers to publicly criticize Donald Trump.
“We have a Constitution. And we have to follow that Constitution. And the president is walking away from it,” Powell said in an interview with CNN, in which he accused him of “lying about a lot of things.
Powell, who served as secretary of state during the George W. Bush administration, and according to the Pew Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, his statements can influence independent voters, who make up 38 percent of the electorate.
Among others, Trump has been criticized by former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Powell has been joined by the voices of several prominent military figures, including former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who said that Trump is not “a mature leader” and accused him of “deliberately trying to divide the country.
Former U.S. Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired general who served in the U.S. government, called on the American people to “look carefully at who you elected.”
Another uniformed man who spoke out against the White House tenant was retired Navy Admiral William McRaven, the commander who led the military operation in which the U.S. killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
“It’s time for new leadership in this country, Republican, Democrat or independent,” adding that “the president has shown that he doesn’t have the qualities to be a good commander-in-chief.’
Current Defense Secretary Mark Esper criticized Trump’s actions during the protests: “I do not support the invocation of the Insurrection Act. These measures should only be used as a last resort, and in the most urgent and extreme situations.
Prominent intellectuals, renowned artists and sportsmen, workers, unemployed, Afro-descendants and Latin Americans, businessmen and ex-soldiers, small landowners ruined by the crisis, young people from all walks of life, have joined in the protests across the U.S.
Many are talking about giving their all so that the current administration will not be re-elected. It looks bad for the tycoon-president. Whatever he does, history is bent on sawing the floor to him.
The CIA and the George Orwell Paradox
The CIA and the Paradox of George Orwell
The novel 1984, by English writer Eric Arthur Blair, known worldwide by the literary pseudonym George Orwell, constituted an accusation against totalitarian regimes and became the Central Intelligence Agencies greatest success
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by:
A CubaNews translation.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.
Photo: Internet
English writer Eric Arthur Blair, known worldwide by the literary pseudonym George Orwell, was a combatant during the Spanish Civil War, which he said he joined “to kill fascists, because someone had to do it.”
His novel 1984 was an indictment of totalitarian regimes and became the CIA’s greatest success in its most widespread propaganda operation against the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
Orwell was born June 25, 1903 in India, where his father worked as a low-level colonial government official at the age of two, he moved with his mother and sister to England.
His literary career was based on those early experiences. He wrote the novel Burmese Days and essays such as A Hanging (1931) and Shooting an Elephant (1936) in opposition to the colonial system, in addition to writing stories about workers’ conditions.
These first texts place him in the liberal tradition of the generation of European writers born at the beginning of the 20th century, defrauded by the crisis of bourgeois society. In the face of the new conflict that German fascism would provoke, many of them took positions sympathetic with socialist ideas and the USSR in opposition to Nazi barbarism.
Another stage in his formation began in the Spanish Civil War, in which he was wounded and knew first hand the internal divisions of the anti-fascist front, among Trotskyists, with whom he sympathized, communists, anarchists and other tendencies. Meanwhile, from the USSR, came news about Stalin’s purges that shook his ideas favorable to socialism in that nation.
He wrote: “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-1937 changed things, and since then, I knew where I was. Every serious line I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and in favor of democratic socialism as I understand it.”
Under these premises he presented in 1945 the novel Animal Farm, a parody of a totalitarian society in which the local animals carry out an insurrection against the humans, a plot which expresses open criticism of the Soviet system and of English society of the time.
Later, in 1948, he finished his novel 1984, in which he presented a world ruled by great dictatorial powers and describes a totalitarian empire directed by “Big Brother”, or the maximum leader. He bases his power on instruments of domination of the whole life of his subjects, whose civil rights are violated and even their love life is regulated.
He spent his last energies in the writing of that narrative, affected by the tuberculosis that would take him to his grave in 1950. [Meanwhile], on the other side of the Atlantic, in the United States, the recently-founded Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) fine-tuned a subversive campaign aimed at “conquering the hearts and minds”, mainly of the European intelligentsia.
One of the propagandistic themes of that battle was the promise that, after the defeat of “Asian barbarism”, identified with the USSR, the Western camp led by the United States would build a better world, based on democracy, human rights and freedom. [This was] a fable in which not a few intellectuals of the time believed.
To achieve that goal, the CIA organized the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the early 1950s. It was supported by a vast global network of allied governments and special services, cultural institutions, think tanks, press organs, publishing houses, foundations, and all kinds of institutions related to the sphere of culture, in a mega operation that extended into the 1960s.
As never before, incalculable efforts, resources and police methods of recruitment, blackmail, propaganda and psychological influence were directed at a sector of the intelligentsia. [They had been] pigeon-holed by the strategists of the special services under the term “non-Communist or anti-Soviet left”, [who were] also joined by some who repented their support for the Soviet ideal in the first half of the century, among whom was George Orwell.
Michael Warner, a CIA historian, wrote that the strategy of conquering that left was “the foundation of the Agency’s political operations over the next two decades,” cites English researcher Frances Stonor Saunders in her book The CIA and the Cultural Cold War.
The researcher points out that after Orwell’s death in 1950, the CIA, through its cultural front, negotiated with the writer’s widow the making of an animated film based on Animal Farm. [It was] considered the most ambitious project of its kind to that time.
More than 100,000 handmade illustrations were used for the animated film. Censorship of the original text was exercised, attacking characters [which he had] depicted as pigs, identified as the English and German bureaucracies and governments, which were removed from the final script to highlight anti-Soviet references.
Something similar happened with the film that was made about the other novel, 1984, in which all criticism of capitalist states was blurred. This turned the work into a notorious anti-communist manifesto, paid for with $100,000 dollars from the U.S. government.
Many years later, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR, the supposed end of history was proclaimed with the victory of the world capitalist system with the United States at its head.
This was the context in which the foundations were laid for the concept of maximum surveillance by the wave of the revolution in new communications and information technologies. This has had a greater impact than ever before on the history of human development in all spheres of society.
The “Big Brother” of Orwellian fiction was established in the new millennium in the virtual world of the Internet. There, the not-so-virtual creeds, yearnings, hopes and information of millions of inhabitants pass. But, unlike the literary image, this new system is built and generalized on programs of artificial intelligence and cutting-edge technology to manipulate society with lies, with media names like “post-truth,” “soft power,” “color revolutions,” “asymmetric wars,” “fake news,” and other concepts.
These doctrines come from the chain production of the centers of the U.S. National Security Agency. They are dedicated to electronic snooping on the secrets of friends and enemies around the globe. [This is done] at the command of the Pentagon and the intelligence community of powerful countries. There, an army of thousands of efficient servants of an empire that seemed destined to surpass by far the ideas of the controversial and censored creator of 1984.
Motives for Emigration to the US
Motives for Emigration to the U.S.
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
The determining ideology in the “First World” defends the free movement of goods and capital but emphatically excludes the possibility of the labor force enjoying that same freedom. It condemns all governmental action in poor countries to protect their products from the effects of an unequal confrontation in the external market. However, it rejects the possibility of the international displacement of labor according to the same law of supply and demand that they claim for their own goods, capital and other factors of production.
In conditions of absolute freedom of movement of goods in the world market, the winner is the one who produces at the lowest cost.This can only be achieved with higher productivity, which is always the one to which the large corporations of developed countries have access through more efficient technology born of their financial superiority. This leaves the poor countries with cheap labor as their only resource to compete.
A genuinely liberal economic globalization, which upholds the principle of competitiveness and fixes in the market the possibilities of all parties, should include the freedom of movement of all factors of production. This would include the labor force, but this possibility is not even mentioned in neoliberal discourse.
In Latin America, the fundamental receiving pole of commercial exchanges, the United States, closes its borders to spontaneous immigration promoted by the laws of the market. It projects programs aimed at attracting immigrants with specific qualifications or political refugees (real or supposed) that suit its political purposes of domination, ignoring the obvious fact that the economy of the United States objectively needs labor, especially unskilled labor.
Such inconsistency reflects the will to avoid conflicts derived from competition between immigrants and their own workers, without forgetting the manifestations of xenophobia and discrimination against minorities that are manifested in that society, due to multiple historical factors.
From the point of view of the U.S. business which exploits immigrant labor, although their interests in the legal prohibition of immigrant income are affected, the continued income of undocumented workers – with depressed rights – solves their needs. The big losers are the undocumented, persecuted, mistreated and super-exploited immigrants. Emigration to the United States becomes the dominant fact of the regional migratory panorama.
But since the last decades of the 20th century, the Latin American and Caribbean migratory process, which from the time of the conquest until then had left a positive balance, has become negative. That is to say, more emigrants than immigrants.
In the 1980s, with the rise of neoliberalism promoted by Ronald Reagan’s government in the United States, Latin America, like the entire Third World, entered a new period. It is characterized by the effects of an unpayable foreign debt that hindered its development, aggravated by the rise of corruption, embezzlement and the discrediting of traditional politicians.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist system in Eastern Europe deprived the world’s underdeveloped countries of an alternative of economic and technical assistance, as well as relatively safe and advantageous markets.
The rich countries took advantage of the conjuncture to impose a neoliberal orientation on the objective trend towards globalization that technological advances determine for the economy of nations. They then reduced development assistance, forced the weakening of state apparatuses, the de-statification of natural resources and the privatization of state enterprises, preferably through their acquisition by U.S. corporations.
Thus, Latin America, which for centuries was a recipient of migration, became a region of emigrant outflow. Tens of millions of Latin Americans have been forced to emigrate in the last twenty years. All this has led to a sharp increase in inequalities and the concentration of wealth in a small number of people and entities in Third World countries.
England, when its fleet was the largest and most efficient in the world, demanded freedom of the seas without protection measures that would raise the competitiveness of the fleets of other countries. Today, the highly developed countries demand freedom of movement fpr their goods and capital, without barriers that protect the production of countries with less economic development. But they do not include that freedom for the workforce.
September 16, 2019. This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
The CIA and Mossad After Mass Shootings
The CIA and Mossad After Mass Shootings
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
After another bloody mass shooting, new catastrophic solutions seem destined to be imposed on an American public frightened by a litany of crimes and a terrifying history of plans to crush internal dissent in the United States, writes journalist Whitney Webb on the Global Research EcoWatch site , belonging to the Ron Paul Institute.
She has recently won the “Serena Shim 2019 for integrity without compromise in journalism” award, dedicated to honoring unconventional journalists who remain true to the truth by challenging difficult times. After the arrest and death in prison of the alleged child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, a technology company of his little known began to receive more publicity, his relationships and finances were widely exposed.
It was revealed that the Israeli company Carbyne 911, or simply Carbyne, had received substantial funds from Jeffrey Epstein, as well as from his close associate and former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and prominent Trump supporter, Peter Thiel
Carbyne is a company that offers call handling capabilities for emergency response services in countries around the world, including the United States, where it has already implemented them in several counties, partnering with major American technology companies.
Carbyne promotes its product as a way to mitigate mass shootings in the United States without having to change the laws for possession of existing firearms.
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has not hidden the fact that placing members of this Unit in the highest positions of multinational technology companies is a deliberate policy aimed at guaranteeing Israel’s role as a dominant global “cyber power”, while serving to combat movements that are directed against violations of international law by Israel and reject criticism of the United Nations to the policies of the Israeli government and its military operations abroad.
As Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to intelligence – both in the United States and in Israel – began to be revealed, Carbyne’s funding was scrutinized, in particular by the company’s deep ties with Israeli intelligence centers, as well as with the intelligence of the United States.
Ehud Barak’s own role as financier and president of Carbyne has also added to that concern, for his long history of involvement in covert intelligence operations for Israel and his long-standing ties to Israeli military intelligence.
Roger Calero: Immigrant, Radical and Worker
Roger Calero: Immigrant, Radical and Worker
From the perspective of a worker living in the United States, I learned to admire the Cuban cause much more…
By DUNIA TORRES GONZÁLEZ
August 8, 2019
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews
From the left: Róger Calero was recently in Havana, this time on behalf of Editorial Pathfinder, to present Farrell Dobbs’ Burocracia Teamster. (Photo: Jonathan Silberman/Militante).
Roger Calero was recently in Havana, in March 2019, at the Museo de los Trabajadores Palacio de los Torcedores, this time on behalf of Pathfinder Publishers to present Teamster Bureaucracy, by Farrell Dobbs (Missouri, 1907-California, 1983), and In Defense of the North American Working Class, by Mary-Alice Waters (1942), two publications that write about the labor movement in the United States. Calero is a union activist and correspondent for The Militant newspaper…
I was happy to know much more about his work, which made me admire the Cuban cause with greater fortitude. I remember the first time we met: Roger Calero and his compañeros, came to Santiago de Cuba to find out about the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. He wanted to help. Later, in a room in San Carlos de la Cabaña, at the 2014 Havana International Book Fair, our first conversation began.
“I’m not that important,” he said, but he agreed to tell me about how he got involved in political activities. His story shows us that other face of the situation of immigrants in the United States, which has nothing to do with the “American dream”. He proudly repeated, “I’ve been a militant for 20 years”.
“Many families risk their children’s lives [trying] to reach ‘the promised land’. For the past 25 years, I have been living in the United States. I witnessed the early years of the Nicaraguan Revolution. I was very impressed. When I moved to the U.S., I learned about the real life of the workers. As a child, you can imagine what the movies convey, what is beautiful, everything in quotation marks… that fetishism of merchandise, that you have to have it, but reality immediately won out. When I started school I realized what the place of each social class was,” he said on that occasion.
From 1990 to 1991, the world witnessed a sad event: the Persian Gulf War, between Iraq and an international coalition of 34 nations led by the United States. His experience tells us: “At that moment thousands of workers showed their opposition. It was time for me to get involved in a conscious way in the political activities and that’s what I did.”
A few years later, in 1994, the California State government passed Proposition 187, a legislative proposal submitted for elections that denied undocumented immigrants social, medical, and public educational services. This was the background to many laws that were imposed by both the Bush and Obama administrations.
This situation provoked great mobilizations among immigrant workers: there were student strikes, work stoppages in which I had the opportunity to participate and help organize. That’s when I came into contact with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
His working life was no less intense. In 1999, when he moved to Minnesota, he had the opportunity to participate in the struggle for unionization in a slaughterhouse: “Between 500 and 600 cows a day were being slaughtered. The employers’ desire for enrichment increased the pace of work. The number of cows, then, was 800 a day. They were the same working days and the same staff, but with a significant change in production.
“This created extremely dangerous conditions for repetitive operations during the eight hours of work. Once again the answer was not long in coming. Among the workers who reacted were Latinos, Somalis, African-Americans… who joined together to organize a union. This fact was a little symbolic, typical of what is happening in the United States today,” he said.
“There is nothing that any Democrat or Republican politician says that can be believed regarding unemployment, working conditions and minimum wages, because the evidence shows the opposite. When you lose your job, the average amount of time between that day and the day you start your new job is 40 weeks. This puts us in a difficult situation because rents do not wait, health insurance does not wait, food does not wait. In a matter of a week or two, you could be losing your apartment.
He later told about the work of The Militant, a weekly newspaper of the People’s Party. They go to working-class neighborhoods, door-to-door, with astonishing results: “The workers are reading not only what is happening in the United States, but also the world. The crisis has been creating uncertainty; but at the same time, interest in our work. Two or three years ago, current readers would not have been interested in the issues we are defending today.”
From the left in the United States, they continue to be part of the class struggles, they did what they had to do in the battle for the liberation of Antonio, Ramón, René, Gerardo and Fernando: “On many occasions we have been blocked from entering the penitentiaries; but immediately we have received the response of the organizations defending constitutional rights, democratic rights and prisoners. This is how they try to limit the spaces that workers and trade unionists need to be able to organize…”.
On that day, Mary-Alice Waters reaffirmed Calero’s words, in the José Lezama Lima room, when she spoke about the work they do in U.S. prisons and support for solidarity campaigns with Cuba.
Calero proudly said some words that I still remember: “This is the story of many workers, but not as happy as mine, because now I know the objective of my struggle.”
Trump Attacks Four Congresswomen
Trump’s Attacks on Four Congresswomen Because of Their Ancestry Repudiated
July 15, 2019
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews
Trump generates a wave of outrage: absolutely racist and anti-American. It’s not something you should hear from the President of the United States.
Trump Rejected As Anti-American and Racist.
Regeneration, July 15, 2019. A few hours ago, Trump attacked four congresswomen who lead the popular opposition to his government. It’s a series of Twitter messages where the U.S. president tells them to “go home.
Trump doesn’t say names, but it’s very clear who the attack is aimed at.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s response from New York:
It is important to keep in mind that the words of today’s President, who tells four congresswomen of color to “return to their own country,” are the distinctive language of white supremacists.
Trump is comfortable leading the Republican Party into racism, and that should worry all Americans – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Racist and anti-American.
For her part, Senator Harris pointed out that the subject is old-fashioned and is still heard in the streets, but it is not something that should be said by the president of the United States.
“It’s absolutely racist and anti-American. And it’s an old trope – going back to where you came from that, you know, you might hear it on the street, but you should never hear that from the president of the United States,” Harris told the media.
Trump Against U.S. Congresswomen
“Return to your crime-infested countries,” wrote the U.S. president.
The response was not long in coming from dozens of Internet users, from citizens to politicians and the media.
“Attitudes such as these would be scandalous in any country in the world, but apparently, the American president acts outside of civility and proper political behavior,” postulates an American citizen.
The U.S. president does not name any particular person.
But among those mentioned would be Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent.
White nationalism, xenophobia and chauvinism. Disgustin.
Among the reactions, there is no hesitation in describing Trump’s statements as “despicable” and “repellent.”
What is certain is that three of the attacked congresswomen were born in the United States and one of them arrived at twelve years of age.
In this sense, they accuse the statements of “unmasking once again their white nationalism, xenophobic and chauvinism .
-It’s disgusting,” she points out.
Women’s collective opposing the object of the attack on Trump
Trump would have dedicated this diatribe to the female collective known as ‘The Squad’:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Congresswoman from New York. Born in New York, of Puerto Rican descent.
Just like Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, from Michigan, born in Detroit, has Palestinian parents.
In the case of Ilhan Omar from Massachusetts , who arrived as a refugee from Somalia at the age of twelve. And she was the first Muslim woman elected to the U.S. Congress in 2016.
Finally, Ayanna Pressley, from Massachusetts, an activist woman of black descent.
The politics of division is how this Administration works. We are here to serve our country. Our families are here. Our children are here. We are here. I’m with my sisters.
A Humorous Exception in the US Press
A Humorous Exception in the US Press
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
For those who are not very knowledgeable about the reality of the U.S. press, it is surprising to learn that in the leading country of world capitalism, that there is a publication with a history of more than 65 years of uninterrupted publication, with an apparent freedom of content and, most exceptionally, without advertising. characteristics that are not found in any other media of that great center of capitalism.
Last week, the current owners of the humorous magazine MAD, the company DC comics, announced that the magazine was about to suspend publication. MAD, which had started as a comic book in 1952, becoming a magazine in 1955, it will cease publication and, according to informed, it will only continue to circulate in its next numbers with reprinted material to meet existing subscriptions, but not including new material.
Born in the turbulent era of McCarthyism, MAD is about to die in another squalid political era, Trump’s. MAD was possibly the largest and most influential satirical magazine in the United States, a strange statement from a large circulation publication that was read, throughout its existence, mostly by teenagers and children.
Its content was often rude, tasteless and childish, which made it even more powerful as a tributary of youth culture. The children that read MAD learned to distrust authority, whether it was political, advertising or journalistic. It was a model that successive generations took seriously. Without MAD, it is impossible to imagine the underground comics National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, The Daily Show or Stephen Colbert.
In the history of American culture, MAD is the crucial link between the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and the counterculture that emerged in the 1960s. A writing in The New York Times Magazine on the 25th Anniversary of MAD in 1977, said that “month after month and edition after edition, in a relentlessly kind manner, MAD tells us that everything was crooked, that there were lies in advertising, that other comic hooks lied, that television and movies lied and that adults, in general, when faced with the unknown, lied. “
An impressive variety of prominent cultural figures witnessed the molding force of MAD. Gloria Steinem has said:
“There was a spirit of satire and irreverence in MAD that was very important, and it was the only place where that could be found in the 50s. ”Singer Patti Smith made a similar observation more succinct: “After MAD, drugs were nothing.”
Kurtzman, the genius who was the source of MAD, sometimes denied any political intentions. He admitted that he made an exception with McCarthy because he was “so evil that it was like making a satire about Hitler.”
The first years of MAD were extremely dangerous times for Gaines. His business manager was arrested for selling disgusting literature in the form of a comic that parodied Mickey Spillane’s violent police novels. (The story was titled “My Gun is the Jury” and Stuart had to serve a year in jail before the judge dismissed the case.
Besieged by the Senate, the legal system, parent groups, other publishers and distributors, Gaines had to give up the comics. Turn MAD into a magazine that constituted its lifeboat. Initially, Gaines and Kurtzman were friends, although they eventually separated when, in 1956, Kurtzman asked for half the ownership of the magazine.
When they got along, Gaines didn’t even care when Kurtzman’s ad skits bothered advertisers. In fact, after the separation from Kurtzman, Gaines decided to do MAD on his own in 1957, a policy that continued until 2001 (almost a decade after Gaines died in 1992).
MAD’s will to tweak the noses of the powerful won him many enemies. In 1961, retired brigadier general Clyde J. Watts claimed that MAD was “the most insidious communist propaganda that existed in the United States.” In 1979, Bill Wilkinson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote to the magazine saying: “You and the Jewish-communist magazine MAD are obviously trying to wipe out the colors of our flag and promoting radicalism in the youth of this country. ”
Gaines would cite the progressive tabloid PM, which flourished briefly in the 1940s, as a precedent for MAD’s non-advertising policy. “In those days there was no such thing as stopping publishing an anti-cigarette story out of terror about the possibility of losing your cigarette advertising,” Gaines noted.
July 26, 2019.
Offended Reps Respond to Trump
Offended Congresswomen Respond to Trump
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
“Despite the attempts by the occupant of the White House to marginalize and silence us, know that we are more than four people.”
“We follow the mandate to defend and represent those ignored, excluded and abandoned. Our squad is big. Our squad includes anyone who commits to building a more equitable and just world. This is the work that we want to go back to . Given the size of this squadron and this great nation, no one will be able to silence us.”
That’s how the four U.S. congressmen responded: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib, to the campaign of racist epithets launched against them by President Donald Trump who has offended simultaneously with his orders to armed agents to terrorize immigrants in the United States. and communities across the country.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, paraphrasing Trump’s campaign slogan promoting his re-election, accused him of trying to “make America white again (instead of powerful)”.
Trump had tweet with irony: “How interesting to see the “progressive” Democratic congresswomen, who come from countries where the governments are a complete and total catastrophe telling us, with screams and aggressively, how we should exercise our government in the States Why don’t you go back to those places that you’ve completely come to? less and crime-ridden where they come from to help fix the situation, Trump asks them the same way.
“Go back to where they came from? Let it be known that three of the congresswomen attacked by the President were born in the United States. Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez, is a native of the Bronx, in New York. She is the youngest woman elected to Congress; Ayanna Pressley, born in Cincinnati, is the first congresswoman to be born in Cincinnati. She is an African-American) representing the state of Massachusetts. Rashida Tlaib of Detroit is Palestinian-American; together with Ilhan Omar, they are the first two Muslim women to occupy seats in the Congress”.
Omar has been a U.S. citizen for more than a year. Melania, Trump’s third wife and current first lady, is a native of Slovenia.
Trump’s racist tweets have come to unite the fractured Democratic Party and quickly activated a demonstration of support for the four brand-new congresswomen, now collectively being called called “the squad.” Although it was the first formal reprimand of the House of Representatives Representatives to a president in office in more than a century, we must bear in mind that Pelosi blocked a more serious motion that tried to censure Trump.
Trump redoubled his verbal attacks against the four congresswomen whom he accused of being socialists and communists. These were typical attacks of the era of the McCarthyism. This should come as no surprise to anyone, as the first Trump’s attorney was Roy Cohn, who served as a lawyer for Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, at a time when he destroyed thousands of lives with his policies of anti-communist persecutiopn.
Probably, the use of racist rhetoric to ignite your white electoral base is one of Trump’s campaign strategies. In his book “Black History of the White House,” American University Profesor Clarence Lusane wrote, “For many Americans, the ‘white’ of the White House has implied a great deal. more than the color of the mansion; it has symbolized the tonality and the source of dehumanizing cruelty, domination and exclusion that have defined the long narrative of white people’s relationships with people of color in America.”
Last week, the four congresswomen who so clearly challenged Trump gave a press conference, in which they denounced the racism experienced by them and people of color in the United States. in general, noted the president’s policies on the detention of immigrants, family separation and the threatening raids of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A major article by journalists and activists Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan was published on the DEMOCRACY NOW website on July 19 with the title “President Trump redefines the concept of the White House”, provides important elements of analysis of the crucial racial conflict undercurrent that is resurfacing with his “cheerful” twitter and his band of jackals.
June 22, 2019.
This article can be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as a source.
US National Pride Declines Sharply
US National Pride Declines Sharply
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.
On the eve of their July 4 national holiday celebration, the national pride of the people of the United States fell this year to the lowest rate since the beginning of the 20th century.
According to an extensive Gallup survey, only 70 percent of Americans say they are proud of their nationality and less than half (45 percent) say they are extremely proud of it, marking the second consecutive year that the latter proportion is no longer in the majority.
Those who claim to be supporters of Democrats continue to lag far behind those who, being Republicans, claim extreme pride in their nationality. U.S. scientific achievements in military and cultural/artistic fields are among those of which they are the proudest, while the political system and the health and welfare system are those of which they are the least proud.
Citizens’ extreme pride in their U.S. citizenship has steadily weakened in recent years, and the current reading, according to Gallup’s June 3-16 survey, marks the lowest point to date in such indicators. The latest decline of two percentage points from last year’s 47% is not statistically significant.
The highest proportions in this aspect of the measure were 69% and 70%, respectively, between 2002 and 2004, after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, when the U.S. public expressed the highest patriotic levels and mobilized in support of the U.S. government. However, since the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term in office in 2005, less than 60 percent of Americans have expressed extreme pride in being Americans.
The latest general declines in patriotism have been largely driven by Democrats, whose pride has historically been smaller and has fluctuated more than that of Republicans. The last extreme pride reading of 22% of Democrats is the lowest of the group in Gallup’s 19-year measurement, and is half of what it was several months before Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016.
Interestingly, most Republicans say they remain extremely proud of their country, and the latest reading – which was 76% – is only 10 points below the 2003 high. Even when Barack Obama held the presidency, the Republicans’ extreme pride never fell below 68%.
U.S. patriotism shows itself as another victim of the markedly polarized political climate in the United States today. For the second time in 19 years, less than half of Americans say they are extremely proud of their country. The decline reflects the collapse of pride in the Democrats since Trump took office. This is despite the fact that, among Republicans, it has increased slightly rather than decreased on the basis of nationalist and even chauvinist policies, reflected in the slogan Make America Great Again!
While supporters of both parties agree that they are not proud of the U.S. political system, this can be attributed, in both cases, to President Trump’s low approval rating.
Democrats’ awareness of Trump’s historically low rate of presidential approval in the international community may also be a contributing factor to the decline of patriotism in this latest poll. Gallup data from earlier this year found that only 31% of Americans (including 2% of Democrats) think foreign leaders have respect for Trump.
Politics is affecting Democrats’ overall pride in their country more than in Republicans. The “independents,” that is, those who are not tied to either of the two parties the system admits, have historically manifested less pride in being Americans than the Republicans. Currently, 41% of them express extreme pride, which is the lowest reading of this trend.
Several subgroups that typically identify with the Democratic Party (women, liberals, and young adults) express lower levels of extreme pride in being U.S. citizens.
American patriotism is the latest victim of the markedly polarized political climate in the United States today. For the second time in 19 years, less than half of American adults say they are extremely proud to be Americans. The decline reflects the plummeting pride of Democrats since Trump took office, contrasted with a slight rise among those who declare themselves Republicans.
July 17, 2019.
This article can be reprinted citing Por Esto! as the source.
How Billionaires Define Socialism
How Billionaires Define Socialism
By Manuel E. Yepe
http://manuelyepe.wordpress.com/
Exclusive for the daily POR ESTO! of Merida, Mexico.
A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
It wasn’t surprising to hear multi-billionaires Bill Gates, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, interviewed on CNBC-TV on Thursday, May 9, defending capitalism. But it was indeed surprising that Gates made a positive comment about socialism, or at least about what is defined in the United States as socialism.
Gates pointed out that the current increase in pro-socialist rhetoric in the United States does not really refer to socialism according to any conventional definition of the word. The “socialist” policies that we hear from politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Bernie Sanders are, to a greater extent, about capitalist policies with a strong social security contribution. And that is good!
“Socialism used to mean that a State controlled the means of production”, and, according to Gates, “many people here who promote socialism do not define it in that classical way.”
Gates also says that most people who favor socialism in the United States do not speak of true socialism. And they’re right!
“The majority does not argue against capitalism… only believes that there should be changes in taxes, more progressive tax rates, and the reinstatement of estate tax. What they actually want is capitalism with a better level of taxation,” says Gates.
According to him, most left-wing Americans do not advocate the ownership of the means of production to be passed on to the workers, that all industries be nationalized, and that private property be abolished, which are the real principles of socialist ideology.
The majority of left-wing people support politicians who promise capitalism with a solid social security foundation. But there is no indication that what they are proposing is truly socialism.
The federal employment guarantee of AOC, for example, would consist of a reference standard for employment that would include a minimum wage of $15 linked to inflation, full medical care, and paid leave for sickness and children.
This proposal would drastically improve the quality of employment in the United States by giving training and experience to the workers and at the same time providing much needed public services to communities in areas such as, education, health, park maintenance, childcare, and environment conservation.
But that’s not socialism in the classic sense of the word. It is capitalism with a strong social safety net. The majority of rich countries in Europe already have what AOC proposes. That doesn’t make them socialists. In any case, it makes them social democrats.
The United States does not have a Social Democratic party, thus, anything to the left of the Democratic Party is called socialism, because Americans do not have a vocabulary that would allow them to speak of these things with greater subtlety than that of a left against a binary right.
Why people like Bernie Sanders and AOC are labeled as socialists, and even sometimes they call themselves by that term?
Because Fox News spent Obama’s years calling all the Democratic Party’s policies so. As a result, there are two generations (Millennials and Generation Z) who simply use the term socialist without worrying too much about what it exactly means.
For the younger generations, socialism only means making sure that everyone can go to the doctor when they need it, or have a roof over their heads, or have money to buy food, regardless of that person’s circumstances.
And these generations believe that all of these can be achieved within the existing system, without overthrowing the ruling class and the setting of a new political system led by the working class.
As Gates points out, there are some real socialists in the world. And there are even real socialists in governments all over the world. But most American socialists are simply leftists who disregard party labels and talk about policies. Bill Gates knows this and Donald Trump knows it too.
It’s not that Bill Gates is progressive. Guys like Gates know clearly that the guillotines are coming, and if the United States continues along the path of austerity and tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, anything can happen.
According to available information, Gates is worth more than $101 billion dollars, which should literally be considered a crime in a civilized society in which 13 million children do not have enough to eat. But, for now, we will have to accept that at least there are some multi-billionaires who recognize the need for real changes in global society.
May 10, 2019.
This article may be reproduced by quoting the newspaper POR ESTO as the source.
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